Paul Krugman as Intellectual Shut-In. Plus, "Libertarian Populism."

has attained that rare level of eminence where he doesn't even have to engage the very opponents he dismisses as beneath contempt. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, he just needs to wave his hand, mumble vague abjurations, and rest assured his devoted minions will finish his work for him….

This is exemplified by his recent discussion of "libertarian populism," during which he starts yammering on about Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) for some reason. From the Beast column:

Had Colonel Krugman ventured outside his ideological compound, he might have happened upon the writings of Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner. To the extent that libertarian populism has a policy agenda, it's mostly thanks to Carney, who likes to write books attacking right- and left-wing crony capitalists. He's libertarian in that he consistently believes that freer markets function more fairly and more efficiently, and he generally thinks people should be left alone when it comes to economic and personal freedom (he's not an absolutist on most things). He's populist in that he is basically obsessed with what he sees as concentrations of power and wealth among elites who rig markets, status, and more against the little guy….

You can take or leave some or all of Carney's libertarian populism…but to confuse it with Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity is a sign that Krugman needs to get out more often. Intellectual shut-ins are a dime a dozen these days, and they all stink just as bad as the next one.

Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time. Report abuses.

n a blog post meditating on why he is always right (a curse, really, I’m sure), Krugman briefly considered the remote possibility that he was stacking the deck by either unfairly cherry-picking data or opponents to his own advantage.

A world in which Krugman is actually always right is a world that I have no desire to be a part of.

Krugman takes it as a point of pride that he doesn’t read his opponents’ arguments. He has admitted this. Responding to an attack by Krugman on your political beliefs is therefore pointless for two reasons:

1. He clearly has no idea what your beliefs are because he’d rather re-read The New Industrial State or The Affluent Society for the 7000th time than understand his opponents

2. He’s not going to read your response to his attacks because that would interfere with his reading The New Industrial State for the 7001st time.

It’s more petty than that; if he read his opponents arguments, he’d be challenged to rebut them, which is pretty impossible. If he tried, he’d just look like an idiot and lose favor with anyone that might still buy into his bullshit.

It’s kinda like the GZ trial in a way. The only thing Zimmerman could’ve done by taking the stand is hurt his case; so just say nothing.

When you decide that you will grow up to control the world’s economy because you read a sci-fi book when you were 13, there’s a good chance that intellectual honesty will not be one of the hallmarks of your career.

I like Asimov, but I always thought found Hari Seldon and his psychohistory to be very unsettling. Maybe because I instinctively realized that a certain type of asshole might think it was a real thing.

In think this finally explains something that has puzzled me about Krugman, though. I’m convinced that he often knowingly lies (not surprising) but what’s strange is that he’s glib, almost gleeful about it. Now I get it. In his mind he’s Hari Seldon, telling his scientific lies and creating a better future.

I didn’t grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.

Knowing math is always good. It’s just that other human beings are not a collection of numbers that you can just plug into an equation and get the desired output. He basically denies the very existence of human agency, except the agency of technocrats and economists like himself.

What modern leftists are is essentially a cargo cult of math and science worshipers. They assume math can solve every problem if you just figure out the proper equations, but they don’t realize that not everything is capable of being quantified.

In the case of economics, you’re talking about such a massive number of moving parts that the very idea of coming up with an equation to control those parts is ludicrous. You’d have an easier time counting to infinity.

What modern leftists are is essentially a cargo cult of math and science worshipers. They assume math can solve every problem if you just figure out the proper equations, but they don’t realize that not everything is capable of being quantified.

Yep. Many of them replace a faith in religion with a faith in science and math, and in so doing really ruin what is great about science and math- it’s not faith based!

Yes, I respect understanding mathematics as well (my field is quantitative). I certainly didn’t mean to disparage that. But I suppose it’s the lack of recognition of human agency that caught my eye.

I wasn’t disagreeing, just pointing out that Krugabe’s literary hero, Asimov, treats humans like numbers in the Foundation novels, while at the same time, giving mechanical beings agency. Krugman doesn’t see this contradiction.

You are wrong. It was suggested some time ago, right here on these pages, that he is in fact a Dadaist performance artist provoking the idiocy of the left out into the light.

Tim Cavanaugh made the argument once that Keynes’ General Theory on Yada Yada was really a modernist era work of literature disguised as an economic treatise. My own familiarity with it comes from reading the Failure of the New Economics, where Hazlitt goes in depth about the allusive, changing meaning of words in that text. Keynes was certainly sophisticated enough to pull that off, but not someone as witless as Krugman.

The Japanese have spent 20 years trying every trick in the Keynesian book to get their economy going again. They have failed over and over. Meanwhile, they have collected debt that is equal to 230% of their GDP.

To see if his other audience is as critical as ours. They don’t lay a finger on him. Pathetic really. One believed that because Nick isn’t a liberal who fawns over Krugman he must be a fundie riding the back of a dinosaur.

Are they seriously calling him a ‘repuke?’ Sweet Jesus, leftists are unbelievably childish.

This shouldn’t surprise me since liberals seem to have an incessant need to lurch from one pants wetting tantrum to another, but it just amazes me how someone could grow to adulthood and remain so infantile.

They never seem to consider that we’re not arguing that we shouldn’t pay for roads or sanitation systems. If we paid just for those things that all of us use (roads, sanitation, national defense) we could pay about 1/100,000 of what we pay now.

Almost all government spending is direct payments to various groups, not roads or sanitation.

Yep, completely correct. If you were to simply get the government out of the welfare business, you’d pay off the accrued national debt within a decade. But that’s the moral equivalent of sending anyone who is over 70, a single parent, or a high school dropout to the gas chamber and therefore unthinkable.

Krugman checked out 15 years ago. He’s been in retirement, collecting paychecks for baseless bloviation and royalties for affixing his name to the textbooks his wife writes. And his sycophants eat it up.

Hey, man, you don’t talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he’ll… uh… well, you’ll say “hello” to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you. He won’t even notice you. And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say, “Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you”… I mean I’m… no, I can’t… I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s… he’s a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas…

Hey, man, you don’t talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he’ll… uh… well, you’ll say “hello” to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you. He won’t even notice you. And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say, “Do you know that ‘us’ is the middle word in Bush? If you can keep your spending going when all the Rethuglicans about you are pushing austerity and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you”… I mean I’m… no, I can’t… I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s… he’s a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas…

From DB comments:Whatever any of you think President Obama’s actions shortened the Great Recession and I firmly believe the recovery would have been faster and stronger had he been “allowed” to fully implement his infrastructure plan and prevent massive layoffs of government workers jobs

The libertarian agenda is one of tyranny. Think about it. Libertarians want to subject people to economic liberty. How do you go about doing this? You must use force. How else can you stop those who create and enforce barriers to economic activity? You’ll have to force them to stop. So libertarians are all about using force. All that liberty stuff is just a charade. Libertarians are tyrants.

Intellectual shut-ins are a dime a dozen these days, and they all stink just as bad as the next one.

I’d wake up and there’d be nothing. I hardly said a word to my readers, until I said “yes” to eternal stimulus. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back to Stockholm. I’m here a week now… waiting for inflation… getting richer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Libertarians like Paul Ryan and Rudy Giuliani squat in the bush, they get stronger. Each time I looked around the walls moved in a little tighter.

Liberals have to destroy Libertarian populism because it reveals the biggest and most fundamental truth about progressivism, it is class warfare waged by the elite against the poor and middle class. The biggest lie Progs tell themselves is that they are looking out for the little guy.

It’s just that other human beings are not a collection of numbers that you can just plug into an equation and get the desired output. He basically denies the very existence of human agency, except the agency of technocrats and economists like himself.

This is appropriate here, too:

Progressives merely want to make the world a better place, by making you a better person; at gunpoint, if necessary.

Good thing you still write for the daily beast occasionally. Otherwise, how would I know about “Hottest women over 40”, “summer dates inspired by yolo”, whoever she is, “naughtiest bits of shades of grey speed read by a zombie”, “music’s scandalous videos”, “clooney batting with longoria” and other assorted bits of NSFW goodies.